BAM Blog Questionnaire: Choreographer David Dorfman

by Lauren Morrow

David Dorfman; photo by Adam Campos

David Dorfman Dance returns to BAM this week with Come, and Back Again, a new work that explores how hope and humility help to manage the messiness of daily life. Dorfman, who is also the chair of the Connecticut College dance department, took some time to answer the BAM Blog Questionnaire.

How has the choreographic experience of Come, and Back Again been different from other processes?
Well, the biggest thing is that we began with Patti Smith’s music and made numerous sketches to her fine work. Then we switched to Smoke—almost like a choreographic exercise I'd give my advanced comp class at Connecticut College. But besides the music factor, we’ve returned to a smaller group—a quartet, for the first time in a decade, and that’s been intimate and fulfilling. And it’s the first time in longer than a decade that we’ve had a live band by our side throughout the process and performance—completely delightful! CABA, although sensitive and inspired by music every step of the way, has really been a return to a more personal way of working on a dance, mining what issues are coming up for me and for the company as the center of the evening. With CABA we’ve moved from larger social issues to more intimate, personal issues.

Who is Benjamin Smoke?

by Ryan Mauldin

Donning a frayed, cotton dress and a shabby beehive wig, she drags on her cigarette and teases the audience with intermittent flashes of skin, if only they will pay for a glimpse. Ms. Opal Foxx, né Robert Dickerson, queen of a thriving, close-knit music scene in Cabbagetown, a former mill town in Atlanta, Georgia, is the inspiration for David Dorfman's production Come, and Back Again, which explores "the mess we create and the mess we leave behind."

In the late 1980s Benjamin, Dickerson's elected moniker, fronted the Opal Foxx Quartet, then the premier group of Cabbagetown’s underground music scene, which included the Jody Grind with Kelly Hogan and Chan Marshall (Cat Power). Opal Foxx, between 10 and 14 members, was a junkyard jamboree of rock, blues, and honkytonk filtered through a punk ethos and the gravelly baritone of its cross-dressing frontman, a confluence of Flannery O’Connor and the Cockettes. The band’s debut album, The Love That Won’t Shut Up (an allusion to Lord Alfred Douglass’ line, “the love that dare not speak its name”), included songs produced by Michael Stipe, who saw them perform in Athens.